Verifying your email address

Verifying your primary email address ensures strengthened security, allows GitHub staff to better assist you if you forget your password, and gives you access to more features on GitHub.

In this article

About email verification for personal accounts

You can verify your email address after signing up for a new account, or when you add a new email address. If an email address is undeliverable or bouncing, it will be unverified.

If you do not verify your email address, you will not be able to:

  • Create or fork repositories
  • Create issues or pull requests
  • Comment on issues, pull requests, or commits
  • Authorize OAuth app applications
  • Generate personal access tokens
  • Receive email notifications
  • Star repositories
  • Create or update projects
  • Create or update gists
  • Create or use GitHub Actions
  • Sponsor developers with GitHub Sponsors
  • Accept organization invitations

Warnings:

  • You cannot verify email addresses from disposable email address services (services that allow you to receive email at a temporary address that expires after a certain time). If you'd like to keep your email address private, you can use a GitHub-provided noreply email address. For more information, see "Setting your commit email address."
  • If an organization you're a member of restricts email notifications to an approved email domain, you'll need to verify an email address in that domain to receive email notifications about activity in the organization. For more information, see "Restricting email notifications for your organization."

About email verification for managed user accounts

If you are a member of an enterprise with managed users, your email address is considered unverified if it is used as a verified email by another account on GitHub. To verify the email, you will need to unverify the email address for the other account, then verify it for your managed user account. See "Changing your primary email address."

Having an unverified email address does not affect most actions you can take on GitHub. However, it may prevent you from accessing some third-party GitHub Apps and OAuth apps.

Verifying your email address

  1. In the upper-right corner of any page on GitHub, click your profile photo, then click Settings.

  2. In the "Access" section of the sidebar, click Emails.

  3. Under your email address, click Resend verification email.

    Screenshot of email addresses on the "Emails" page. Under an email address, a link, labeled "Resend verification email," is outlined in orange.

  4. GitHub will send you an email with a link in it. After you click that link, you'll be taken to your GitHub dashboard and see a confirmation banner.

Troubleshooting email verification

Unable to send verification email

You cannot verify email addresses from disposable email address services (services that allow you to receive email at a temporary address that expires after a certain time). If you'd like to keep your email address private, you can use a GitHub-provided noreply email address. For more information, see "Setting your commit email address."

Error page after clicking verification link

The verification link expires after 24 hours. If you don't verify your email within 24 hours, you can request another email verification link. For more information, see "Verifying your email address."

If you click on the link in the confirmation email within 24 hours and you are directed to an error page, you should ensure that you're signed into the correct account on GitHub.com.

  1. Sign out of your personal account on GitHub.com.
  2. Quit and restart your browser.
  3. Sign in to your personal account on GitHub.com.
  4. Click on the verification link in the email we sent you.

Email is already verified by another user

If you see the error message Error adding EMAIL: Email is already verified by another user, you must either unverify the email for the other account before proceeding, or choose a different email address to verify.

To unverify an email address, delete it in your email settings, then optionally re-add it without verifying to keep any commits linked to your account. See "Changing your primary email address."

Further reading